Thomas Kuhn Short Quotes

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Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

Thomas Kuhn
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.

Thomas Kuhn
Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.

Thomas Kuhn
To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.

Thomas Kuhn
Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?

Thomas Kuhn
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

Thomas Kuhn
Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.

Thomas Kuhn
Literally as well as metaphorically, the man accustomed to inverting lenses has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.

Thomas Kuhn
What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

Thomas Kuhn
No theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect.

Thomas Kuhn
A paradigm is what members of the scientific community share, and, conversely a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.

Thomas Kuhn
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

Thomas Kuhn
Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.

Thomas Kuhn
We must explain why science — our surest example of sound knowledge — progresses as it does, and we first must find out how, in fact, it does progress.

Thomas Kuhn
Probably, the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that led the old one to a crisis..

Thomas Kuhn
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.

Thomas Kuhn
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

Thomas Kuhn
[The] most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms... is that "the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds."

Thomas Kuhn